The present invention is related to network communications and, in particular, to a method and system for allowing users to access and/or share personal media libraries, including multimedia collections of audio and video information, via a wide area network or a group of networks, i.e., the Internet, for example.
One cannot disagree that appreciation of music is enhanced through greater understanding of the performing artists, as well as of the music itself. In most cases, music experts offer invaluable information on a particular music piece, genre or artist, which is not widely known by the public. Based on the music collection owned by an average user, the experts may reveal to the user a different listening experience by arranging the pieces to play in a particular order and by providing a personal commentary accompanying this arrangement.
The average user, however, typically has no access to this tailor-made expert information. Namely, the user may own a number of Compact Disks (CD) with classical music, for example, and he or she listens to these CDs in random order. Although the pieces in the user personal library can be researched individually to determine what every one of them represents, the user typically cannot properly digest and synthesize such a piece-meal information to obtain a collection that transcends the user's random listening. Only with the music experts' help can the user achieve that ultimate listening experience by combining individual pieces from various CDs to form a special playlist: it is as if a unique CD or tape were produced for the user by an expert or group of experts. It is possible to obtain such a unique CD by spending a lot of effort in laboriously writing down the titles of each album and sending them to the experts. Or, the experts may be invited to the user's home for advice and coffee. Both alternatives do not appear to be viable or, at best, easily achievable.